The tweakers are crashing on us

American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.

Most scientists believe that only objective factors are real and try to eliminate all subjectivity from their explanations — subjectivity is seen primarily as a source of error. Economists are the most objective social scientists, and they customarily sneer at dumber so-called scientists who fail to reduce human behavior to hard facts.

When things are going well, that is. During times of prosperity, economics is a hard science like physics. It’s only when things go badly that they kick the can over to psychology and reach for mental factors like “irrational exuberance” and “mental depression” so that they can blame other, stupider sciences for their failures. (Quantum physicists also reach desperately for The Mind at times, since after sixty or seventy years their data are still impossible to interpret.)

So here’s my explanation of the present Collapse of Western Civilization: amphetamines. The world of finance is a rather small one, populated entirely by supersmart, extremely aggressive and competitive men (mostly) who have to go at top speed twelve or more hours a day, day after day. How do they do it? Performance-enhancing drugs, that’s how: legally-prescribed amphetamines. (Cocaine is uncool and very Eighties.)

And since finance controls the world, when the tweakers crash, the whole world crashes with them. Like a football team collapsing in the fourth quarter, the world has run out of beans. We’ve had our jag, and now we’re crashing. Not much fun.

In my small experience, amphetamines are very nice. The world becomes a happy place. You get smarter and have lots of energy, and you can keep on going indefinitely. Complex ideas seem simple and all of your ideas look good. The crash isn’t even that bad if you use in moderation. But amphetamines are not conducive to moderation.

A friend working in a major science research institute has told me in confidence that a psychologist had told him (also in confidence) that the majority of the researchers there were using amphetamines or something of that kind. Paul Erdős, one of the greatest mathematicians of our time and probably the most prolific, was famous for his reliance on amphetamines. Science magazine has recently suggested that we seriously look into the possibility that the use of amphetamines for performance enhancement should be medically authorized, allowing scientists to do openly what they’re already doing under the table.

Erdős always worked with collaborators, and maybe this is the reason for that. While it’s working, amphetamine only shows you the bright side of things. It doesn’t enhance your judgment, your capacity for self-criticism, or your awareness of problems. Maybe Erdős needed a ground man — someone to point at his work and say “You know, Paul, I think that you skipped about seventeen steps right there.”

The mathematics community is self-policing, but finance absolutely isn’t. A rising tide raises all boats, and when things are going well a glib but clueless investor can keep winning for years. Furthermore, someone’s who’s already persuasive will be even more persuasive while in the grip of amphetamine-induced enthusiasm. Optimists who believe what they’re saying are the best con men, and speed gives them the sincere optimism they need. (Have Glassman and Hassett ever been pee tested?)

Negative thinking is necessary and good. The disseminated optimism of crowds is not to be trusted. If we’d had fewer people lighting candles and more people cursing the darkness, we wouldn’t be in this fix.

This reminds of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers strip where the government try to head off a recession by adding amphetamine to the water supply on the grounds that “Doctors use it to treat a depression, so why don’t we”?

If I recall they end up sending everyone manic and have to add lithium to the water to try and cancel it out.

Dec. 16, 2008 – Methamphetamine is the most concentrated illicit drug found in U.S. wastewater, report scientists who’ve found a way to measure drug use on a citywide basis.

The drugs get into the wastewater because they are excreted in the urine.

Meth was detected in five of seven municipalities in concentrations higher than reported in previous studies — all done in Europe. The five cities that flushed the most meth were in the Western and Southern regions of the U.S.
…
Among the study’s other findings:

Cocaine was found in all seven municipalities, although concentrations were much lower than methamphetamine concentrations. Concentrations were similar to those seen in previous studies, all in European cities.

Ecstasy (MDMA) was detected in five of the seven municipalities.

MDA (methylenedioxyamphetamine, a psychedelic amphetamine) was detected in three of the seven municipalities.

Ketamine, used both legally and illegally, was found in two municipalities.

PCP (“angel dust,” phencyclidine) was found in only one municipality.

No LSD could be detected in any of the seven cities.

Hydrocodone, oxycodone, and methadone — frequently prescribed and frequently abused narcotics — were found in all seven cities.

Erdos only started amphetamines at age 60, so it has nothing to do with his collaboration.

abb1’s link is very interesting.

It seems that it would be very easy to test JE’s theory by comparing amphetamine levels in New York vs Philadelphia. The hardest part would be getting permission from the cities, though I think some of the European approaches just use river water.

The article abb1 cites does not identify the seven municipalities. The New York Times coverage describes one of them as “affluent” which does not seem to be in the original article. Somewhere (NPR?) I heard that the same researcher, Jennifer Field, is planning a map of drugs in Oregon, so she doesn’t seem to want to hide the identities of the cities. Moreover, only one town refused to cooperate.

The city / city comparison wouldn’t help, because the hypothesis isn’t that people in finance used more amphetamines than any other groups, but just that they used a lot of amphetamines, to the point that their judgment was adversely affected.

Pharmaceutical overuse by MDs is pretty well document, and problems come from that, though I don’t know of an overall study of how it effected the profession overall.

If you’re saying that everyone uses speed, well, that’s not much of a theory. They’re only human! (It’s something of a theory if everyone used to use cocaine and now everyone uses speed.) If it’s just MDs and financiers, that should show up in a water test.

If you’re saying that very few people use speed, so it shouldn’t show up in the water, then you have to explain why this matters to finance and not to medicine. It’s certainly true that power is more concentrated in finance than medicine (though I’d say that’s more about NY financiers being more important than others, rather than concentration within NY), but you have to explain why the powerful ones are the ones with impaired judgement. Certainly, the rapid career path could select for speed users and fail to offer feedback to teach people how to compensate for the impaired judgement. But I tend to think it’s the underlings working 80 hour weeks who use speed more than the bosses.

Douglas, I’m not trying to figure out who uses the most speed. I’m trying to figure out why finance behaved the way it did. We know that low level tweakers fuck up a lot of what they do (though at the same time, routine, repetitive tasks can be done better with the help of a bit of meth) We also know that a lot of high-achievers use a lot of mood enhancers and energy-enhancers.

So I was speculating that maybe widespread use of mood-enhancers within the rather small finance-finance media-think tank communities, reinforced and multiplied by social-psychological effects, might have affected their collective judgment.

As far as I know, there’s no community where finance-finance media- think tanks comprise a major demographic citywide. I suppose that if you could tap a sewer pipe immediately downstream from Wall Street you might get something. But in truth, I’m not putting much energy into testing this.

This is a fascinating post and hypothesis. Care to say any more about it in a new post?

There does indeed to be rampant and irresponsible use of these ‘legal speed’ ADD/ADHD drugs amongst the American elite…and it’s not difficult to see how these drugs could have skewed and warped their judgment.

I’ve said as much as I know. It’s less than a hypothesis and more than a joke. I’m not really claiming that drug use was causal, just that toxic optimism was a factor, possible involving drug use, and that the tweak-and-crash cycle is similar.

[…] “The tweakers are crashing on us”: was the irrational exuberance chemically enhanced? And if so, does this mean that we should start pee-testing contestants for the Bank of Sweden Prize? Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)the human spiritEcclesiastes 3:18-22 […]